_CULTURE SOCIETY Public Health

Neighborhood-specific data for eastern North Philadelphia has been collected under a single source, to be used for good.

_Amy Carroll-Scott

Carroll-Scott is an assistant professor in the Dornsife School of Public Health and co-lead of the Policy and Community Engagement Core of the Drexel Urban Health Collaborative.

In a city of neighborhoods like Philadelphia, it can be challenging for social organizations and nonprofits to collect data on specific populations to whom they want to provide services because demographic information is widely dispersed among different agencies and public health districts.

“We wanted to provide numbers specific to their neighborhoods so that community-based organizations have what they need, at the ready, when they write grants or advocate for programs or policy changes.”

–Amy Carroll-Scott

A partnership between Philadelphia nonprofit Congreso de Latinos Unidos and Drexel’s Urban Health Collaborative seeks to address that. They’ve charted data on neighborhood-specific violence in eastern North Philadelphia — the nexus of the city’s Latino population that includes neighborhoods like Kensington, Port Richmond and Juniata Park.

Those numbers were unveiled publicly on a new website, NUAVNow.org — an instant boost to the many neighborhood-based community organizations that operate on limited funds and require grants to survive. Standing for “Neighborhood United Against Violence,” NUAV presents data from multiple sources, mapped to describe violence rate, related risk factors and violence prevention assets in eastern North Philadelphia.

This project comes at an important time for the area. Securing grants is hyper-competitive. The data and maps NUAVNow provides at the neighborhood level will give nonprofit organizations an advantage.